by Mel Nicolai
Still, sometimes something will happen, something so improbable it’s difficult to resist the feeling that events have been staged for your benefit. Sometimes you can hardly believe your eyes. That was pretty much where I found myself, standing in the woods outside the Pines Guy’s house: dumbfounded, having trouble believing my eyes.
The silence had suddenly been broken by the sound of the front door being flung open. A young girl, maybe in her late teens, stumbled out, confused. She spun one way, then the other, not sure where she was or which way to go, then ran across the open yard, fleeing whatever was inside the house. Two seconds later, a man stepped through the door, not hurrying, but nonetheless clearly interested in the fleeing girl. He took several steps away from the house, then stopped, his eyes moving up the slope to the thicket where I was concealed. Only I knew I wasn’t concealed—not from the eyes that had fixed directly on me. I knew he could see me as clearly as I could see him, because the man standing in the yard was not a man. I had not seen those eyes for a hundred years. The Pines Guy was Calvin, the vampire who a century earlier had turned me.
The girl, as if determined to add to the improbable, did the same thing the two fighting cats had done a few nights before: she ran straight at me, blindly, scrambling through the underbrush, like a wild animal panicked by the chemistry of fear. When she came within reach, I grabbed her by the wrist. She screamed and started flailing, not so much as if she were trying to escape my grip, but as if she were suddenly possessed by an overwhelming and incomprehensible fury. As if after thinking she had escaped, the misfortune of being so quickly caught again was too much for her, and her mind snapped. I yanked her close and covered her mouth. I assume she continued to struggle, but at the moment I wasn’t paying much attention. Calvin hadn’t moved. We stared at each other for what must have been a full minute, then he did the same thing he’d done the first time our paths crossed. He turned around and walked calmly back into the house and closed the door.
The sound of the door closing was like an off-switch. There was a moment of culminating stillness, and then, as if the switch were flipped the other way, something became clear to me for the first time. A hundred years ago in Sicily, Calvin had turned his back and walked away. He did it knowing how vulnerable I was. He knew there was a good chance I’d make some stupid mistake and end up paying for it with my life. In the intervening hundred years, I had harbored a resentment at what I assumed was his callousness toward my fate. But now, standing there in the woods, I understood for the first time that the callousness, if in fact it had been callousness, was not what I resented. What I resented was being taken for granted.
“The thirst will educate you. Nothing else matters.” That’s what Calvin had said. At the time I had no idea what he was talking about. But as the years passed, his words continued to haunt and irritate me. I could neither forget them nor accept them. His blithe assumption that I could be reduced to the satisfaction of a thirst, that there was nothing in me that was not subservient to, and made insignificant by, my dietary requirements, still ate at me. And now, a hundred years later, wasn’t he making the same assumption? Wasn’t he assuming he could leave the girl in my hands because he could take it for granted that the thirst would settle everything? Wasn’t he assuming that because we were both vampires, my choices would be the same as his choices; my choices would flow from blood because, as a vampire, I had been reduced to blood? That’s what I resented: that I could be reduced to blood.
I don’t know how much time had passed before I realized the girl was having trouble breathing. “Don’t scream,” I said, then took my hand off her mouth. She sucked air like she’d been too long under water. I could smell the blood where her bare feet had been scraped and cut during her escape. She was thin and unkempt and stank of fear.
It didn’t make sense. Why would Calvin bother with bringing a girl back to his house? Was he holding people and siphoning their blood? Why would he complicate his life like that? I just couldn’t see it. That kind of blood farming was way too risky and way too much work. It was far simpler, cleaner and more efficient to go hunting. By the same logic, there was a simple and clean answer to the question of what I should do with this girl. She was a free meal. I could simply drink her blood and walk away, leaving the corpse for Calvin to dispose of.
That was my initial inclination. The minutes passed. The girl had dropped to her knees, no longer squirming. My grip on her wrist was all that stopped her from collapsing completely. I wanted there to be people who deserved to be taken off the menu. Was this girl, mewing in limp defeat, one of them? And if so, what distinguished her? I really had no idea, and the dilemma was maddening.
“Don’t scream,” I said again, then draped the girl over my shoulder like a sack of bones and started back to the road.
I called Karla and she met us a few minutes later where she’d dropped me off. The girl had been whimpering softly most of the way, but seemed to settle down when I put her in the front seat of the car. Karla’s jaw dropped when she saw the girl, but she didn’t waste any time getting practical. She cranked up the car’s heater, then took off her jacket and wrapped it around the girl’s shoulders.
“She’s fucking freezing, Shake! Give me your windbreaker.”
I did as I was told and Karla wrapped it around the girl’s feet. When she was satisfied with her ministrations, she asked, “Is this the missing girl?” apparently having jumped to the conclusion that I’d found the Arnauds’ niece.
I shook my head no, which seemed to disappoint her.
“Who is she, Shake?”
“I don’t know.”
“What? You just found her in the woods?”
“Why don’t we head back to Sacramento,” I said, wanting to put some distance between us and Calvin.
Karla turned back to the girl. “Are you okay, honey?” she asked, making an adjustment to the windbreaker. The girl smiled weakly and nodded. Karla put the car in gear and headed back toward the freeway.
I was wondering if the girl knew where she was, if she would be able to lead someone back to Calvin’s house. I leaned forward so I could see her. She was a lot smaller than Karla. Wrapped in the oversized jacket, she looked like a child. Her eyes were open but unfocused. “What’s your name?” I asked.
She blinked but didn’t look up at me when she spoke. “Joy.”
“Do you know where you are, Joy?”
Again, without raising her eyes, “No sir.”
I hadn’t caught it when she’d said her name, but there was enough accent in the “no sir” to place her from the south. “Where are you from, Joy?”
“Galveston, Texas.”
“How long have you been at that house?”
She finally raised her eyes and looked at me when she answered. “Two weeks maybe. I’m not sure. He was taking my blood.”
That got Karla’s attention. “What’s she talking about, Shake?” Then to the girl, “Who was taking your blood?”
I knew I was going to have to do some explaining to Karla, but I preferred not to do it in front of the girl. “Is that where you were, in Galveston, before someone brought you here?”
“Yes sir. I mean, no sir. I live in Galveston, but I was visiting San Francisco.”
“You have family in Texas?”
“Yes sir.”
“Do you want to go back?” I asked.
“Yes sir,” she said, starting to cry, “I do.”
We rode in silence as far as Folsom where I had Karla exit the freeway and we found an all-night Rite Aid. The girl had fallen asleep and didn’t wake up until the car stopped. Yawning, she raised herself enough to look out the window. Apparently satisfied that she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was or why, she settled back down in the seat, curling up under Karla’s jacket.
While Karla was in the store, I puzzled over what to do with Joy. The airport wouldn’t work. Without ID, she wouldn’t be able to buy a ticket and security wouldn’t let her board a plane. I call
ed Amtrak on my cell phone. There was only one train per day going south, and it had already passed through Sacramento. That meant she’d have to take the bus.
Karla came back with two bottles of water, paper towels, disinfectant, socks, a pair of cheap tennis shoes, two sweatshirts, and a couple of energy bars. I had Joy move to the back seat with me, and told Karla to take us to the L Street Greyhound depot in Sacramento. While the girl ate the two energy bars and finished off one of the bottles of water, I used the other bottle to clean and disinfect the cuts on her feet.
I suggested she get rid of the t-shirt she was wearing. She looked down at the dirt and stains, then pulled it off without modesty. She was thin as a rail. She looked at her arms, rubbing her fingers lightly over the bruised needle marks at both elbows.
“He was taking my blood,” she said again, as if she wanted to be sure I understood.
I pointed to the two sweatshirts. She selected one and pulled it on, thought about it for a second, then pulled the second one on over the first. Karla hadn’t asked the girl her shoe size, but the tennis shoes looked just right. A good example, I thought, of how naturally attentive Karla was to the details of her surroundings. If she wasn’t a vampire’s chauffeur, she would have made a good CIA operative.
Just to settle the matter of the Arnauds’ niece, there was something I wanted to ask the girl before we got to the bus depot. “Joy, were there other girls at that house with you?”
“There was another girl,” she said quietly.
“Do you know her name?”
“I never talked to her. I only heard her.”
She seemed to be embarrassed about something.
“That’s how I got away,” she continued. “The other girl started screaming, and the man left my door unlocked when he went to see why.”
“So you never saw her?”
“I saw her once. Just for a second.”
“What did she look like?”
“I think she was Chinese, or something. Just a little kid.”
“No one else?” I asked.
“No sir, I don’t think so.”
When we got to the Greyhound station, I waited in the car while Karla took Joy inside. She was gone for about half an hour. When she came back, she got in the car without saying anything, and sat for several minutes, fidgeting with the keys while she thought about what she wanted to say.
“The bus doesn’t leave until 8:15,” she said, finally.
“Do you think she’ll get on it?” I asked.
“I guess so.” Then added, as if she wasn’t sure how I would react, “I gave her some money.”
“That was thoughtful.”
“I gave her a thousand dollars,” she clarified.
“It’s expense money. For you to use at your discretion.”
She put the key in the ignition, but didn’t start the car. “Shake, I know I’m not supposed to ask a lot questions, but it would really help me if you told me what happened to that girl.”
She was almost pleading. “Help you?” I asked.
“Yes. Help me make sense out of what’s going on. Who was she?”
“You know as much about her as I do. She’s just a young girl who got caught in something, through no fault of her own, and then she got lucky.”
“So you won’t tell me?” she said, looking me in the eye so I’d know how unacceptable that was to her.
“To be honest, Karla, there are things I can’t explain, and telling you part of the story won’t put your mind at ease.”
“Jesus, Shake! We just rescued that girl from some psycho-fuck kidnapper, and instead of taking her to the cops, we put her on a bus to fucking Texas. And that’s supposed to be the end of it? Like, I’m not supposed to be curious?”
“Look, Karla. I know I’m asking a lot of you, but we’ve done everything we can. The girl was in trouble and we helped her. That should be enough.”
Karla folded her arms tightly across her chest, clearly disinclined to let it go. “What about that asshole in the mountains. Joy said he has another girl. What about her?”
And now, I thought, for the hard part. “I can’t do anything about that, Karla.”
“Can’t or won’t?” she asked, again staring me in the face.
“Both, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t get it,” she said, exasperated. “Who the fuck is this guy? Are you, like, afraid of him, or something?”
“I’m not exactly afraid of him.”
Karla studied my face, her mood shifting from frustration to one of curious surprise. “You know him, don’t you?”
“Our paths crossed once, a long time ago.”
“Jesus, Shake!”
“I’m not afraid of what he might do to me, Karla. I don’t think he’s a threat to me, any more than I’m a threat to him. But I don’t really know him. If I interfere, he might get vindictive. He might come after you, and I don’t want that. And believe me, you don’t, either.”
“We could tell the police. We could report him, like, anonymously, or something.”
“You can’t imagine how pointless that would be.”
“What about Mio? She could help us.”
Bringing up Mio took me completely by surprise.
“She could help us,” Karla said, more optimistically, “couldn’t she?”
“Maybe she could,” I granted, “but I don’t think she would. Either way, I can’t ask her for help. Not with this. And I can’t explain why. You just have to accept that Mio is not an option.”
Sensing the finality in my voice, Karla tried one last tack. “What if I reported him on my own?”
“It sounds like you’re asking me what I’ll do if you report him against my advice not to.”
Karla looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“You’re free to do as you wish, Karla. I can understand you wanting to help the other girl. But going to the police won’t do her any good.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“As I said, the choice is yours.”
“You really won’t do anything?”
“I’ll give you some good advice. Don’t go anywhere near that house in Pollock Pines, ever again. It’s not in your power to hurt the man who lives there. Neither you nor the police are going to do anything other than inconvenience him. As for the girl, my guess is she’s already gone. He won’t take any chances after Joy got away from him. The last thing you want to do is give him a reason to notice your existence, a reason to single you out.”
“Is he really that dangerous?”
“He’s dangerous in ways you can’t imagine. And he’s playing by a very different set of rules. That might not sound important to you, but it is. He’s willing to do things your humanity won’t allow, things you wouldn’t dream of doing. And that makes him unpredictable and extremely dangerous.”
We were nearing the university. Karla hadn’t said anything for several blocks. As we approached the footbridge, I told Karla to turn around, giving her directions to American River Drive.
“You can drop me off at my house,” I said.
“Wow! The mysterious Shake is going to show me where he lives.”
“I understand why you’re upset. I understand that the injustice of this is difficult to ignore. But this is one of those times when you need to step back and pause.”
Karla gripped the steering wheel with both hands and took several long, deep breaths. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want me to trust you about not reporting a psycho who kidnaps and probably tortures and murders young girls, and in return you’re going to trust me with your address!”
“Have you read Borges?” I asked.
The question clearly confused her. “What?” she asked, shaking her head as if to clear it.
“The writer, Jorge Luis Borges.”
“I’ve heard of him,” she said.
“In one of his fictions, a character searches through the pockets of a dead man and finds a small metal cone that is so
heavy, he can barely lift it. The man is mystified by this inexplicable object and, of course, he steals it. Unfortunately for him, the cone has a deleterious effect on anyone in possession of it, and the man comes, as they say, to a bad end.”
“And your point is?” she said, after I’d paused.
“My point is that having my address may not be as light a matter as you think.”
I had her pull up in front of the house. “This is it,” I said. “I live on the second floor. The caretaker lives downstairs. There’s a private entrance in the back.”
We sat quietly for a bit, Karla’s face turned away from me as she studied the house.
“It’s a nice house,” she said, breaking the silence. “I guess I’m a little surprised.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just an ordinary house on an ordinary street. I guess I was expecting something more mysterious.”
I could see she was calming down. We sat a while longer in silence before she spoke again.
“I’ll do what you want, Shake. I’ll stay away from Pollock Pines. And I won’t call the police.” Then, after a minute of silence, asked, “Will you do me a favor?”
“Certainly, if I can.”
“When Mio is back in town, would you tell her I’d like to go dancing again?”
“I’m sure she’ll be pleased,” I said, and got out.
Chapter 22